“The same old Delphick,” I laughed. “For an introduction to the world of grown-ups it must have been a bargain at the price.”
“When I saw him after that I walked right by, but one of these days I’ll smash him in the face, so’s I can forget what he did to me as a kid.”
“He’s a poet,” I said. “He’s a national monument, so what can you expect? He’s incorrigible and irredeemable, and therefore best left alone. He’d end up having the clothes off your back. I didn’t think you were related.”
His laugh was painfully cynical for one so young, as he took a piece of paper from his bomber jacket. “Just listen to this. I ripped it from the Yellow Pages. He’s a right fucking con man.”
“Read it to me.”
“I will. It says: ‘Poetry and prose for all occasions. Why not have fifty glorious lines for a wedding, or a few stanzas of sombre comment for a bereavement? Satisfaction guaranteed. Rates to be negotiated, though reasonable. Ronald Delphick is your man. Enquiries to: Doggerel Bank, Stye-on-the-Ouse, Yorkshire.’ There’s a poem on the other side, and it’s real crap. I’ll read you that, as well.
“Delphick doesn’t work for wages:
Poetry (or even prose) for all occasions,
A sombre promptitude of diaspasons
Or soothing lines for sanguine rages;
Anniversaries, births or weddings
(Makes a specialty of weddings)
But for the dear departed, an ode
For sending him or her along the road
Or, if the loved one’s cat or hound,
He’ll write you something to astound
And fit for framing on the wall:
Delphick versifies for all!’”
“At least he’s enterprising.” I knew little poetry beyond what good ones Frances had read to me. “He doesn’t sponge all the time, though he’s robbed so many that nobody will put up with him anymore. There’s one born every minute, if not two, these days, so I don’t suppose he’ll ever starve.”
Having lived most of my life as a confidence man I could hardly condemn another member of the fraternity. He hadn’t latched onto any big-time scams like me, but instead had committed too many small meannesses, tricking people who couldn’t always afford to be bilked. When I once caught him out his bare-faced response was to say that whoever he had cadged, filched, blackmailed or stolen from should feel privileged to know they had been of assistance to England’s greatest poet, for which statement alone he should have been punched into crippledom, but I’d never had the heart to do it. If he’d robbed the rich that might have been all right, but the rich are too sensible to let the likes of him get close.
“If I ever pass him on the street,” George said, “and he’s at death’s door, I’ll kick him in.”
Even I’d never do that. Luckily, we were bypassing Grantham. “I’m going to put you off here, because I take the A52 for Nottingham.”
“Oh, thank you very much,” he said, too snottily for my liking. “That’s kind of you. Can’t you get me as far as Newark at least?”
I set the hazard lights going on the slip road. “I’d like to, but I’m in too much of a hurry.” I sensed what was coming, though his pockets must have been full of tin, if it was true he’d been working for a farmer in the Fens. “Can you spare a couple of quid?” he said, “so’s I can have a coffee and bun at the next service station?”
Maybe he wasn’t a student, just bumming around the country in the traditional Delphick fashion. I all but pushed him onto the asphalt. “You’ve already had a free ride.”
“Twenty measly miles. I expect that’ll make you feel like a Good Samaritan for a week, but if you give me a few quid you can feel chuffed for a fortnight and get written up in the Bible.”
“Fuck off.” All the Delphicks had a good patter. “Next time I see you on the road I’ll run you over.”
His curses didn’t bear thinking about. Should I give Blaskin a rundown on the trip he could sort them out. “I hope three of your tyres drop off at the same time,” was the most polite of his sallies.
I drove up the ramp and onto the A52, the smell of Nottingham already in the air, not so much black puddings and Woodbine smoke as drifts of curry shot through with whiffs of hard drugs. I decided not to pick up any more autostoppers, especially after searching the so-called glove compartment for a cigar and noticing that the small box of Belgian chocolates for my mother had gone missing. It was hard not to spin round and collar that prime specimen of the Delphick breed, and throw him under the wheels of an oncoming lorry loaded with a hundred tons of gravel, but it was no use trying to reverse bad luck, or worse judgement. The thieving bastard would go to hell in his own way, though I hoped I’d meet him again one day and kick him into the fires.
The dual carriageway coming up was a death trap created by malicious road planners who went everywhere by pushbike and made it their life’s work to kill or maim motorists, because it was only a couple of hundred yards long. I wanted to get by a lorry going at thirty miles an hour and belting out diesel smoke, expecting my sporty little Picaro to make it easily.
For some reason the car lost power, and I thought my time had come. I almost crushed the accelerator through the floor, but there was no boost, so I got back into the inner lane because a shit-coloured banger was right behind me. Even then I could hardly keep up in the dual carriageway stakes, managing thirty for a while, the clutch responding less and less to my prayers, till it flopped so loose it wouldn’t work at all, no doubt knackered by congested London traffic. The car had recently come back from a full service, so I should have known something would go wrong, as I peddled it into a lay-by just before it expired.
Only two years old, at least it had saved me from death. I sat for a moment to reflect, lit a cigar to calm myself, feeling as if in a boat on a salty river without oars or engine, going nowhere, the familiar bereft situation when a car packed up on you.
I upended the bonnet, though didn’t need a mechanic to know that the clutch had gone. Lorries and cars went inches by, causing such shudders that I feared my fragile tin vehicle would be blown over the hedge, or pulled along in the slipstream to be played with by a couple of white vans along the dotted white line. My mother expected me soon after lunch, though a little lateness wouldn’t trouble her. All I had to do was call the AA and get back on the road. The bonnet up was a flag calling for assistance, but the traffic flow continued, no one giving a toss for me. I had visions of camping for a month in the hedge bottom and living on slices of fried turnip poached from the fields. I’d sleep in the dilapidated car till the battery no longer worked my shaver, till I ran out of cigars and matches, till my clothes needed washing and my hair was too long—then I would walk away.
A Silver Cloud glided from the opposite direction, barely missing a black van on its way over, winkers flashing like lighthouse beacons. When snout to snout with my Picaro pal a tall thin-as-a-beanpole man in his fifties with a somewhat kippered face, wearing a yellow pullover, cloth cap, and smoking a large curved Peterson, got out and looked at my engine: “In trouble?”
His throat spoke more than his lips, but I thanked him for the enquiry. “My clutch has gone bang, so I’ll have to call the AA. There’s a farm up the road, and I was about to go and ask for the use of their phone.”
“Edward, why have we stopped?” a woman called from his car.
He poked his head inside. “Chap in distress, that’s why.”
“Oh, bollocks!” I was glad she came out because it gave me the chance to look at a pouting mouth I so wanted to kiss that it brought me back to life and hope, red cardigan over a thin black sweater moulding lively little breasts I longed to get my hands over. She wore a red skirt it was all I could do not to lift, and black stockings I yearned to roll down, at least as far as her ankles. Black hair brushed back from a high forehead was tied by a ribbon, and I wondered h
ow much of her nakedness it would cover if allowed to flow like Lady Godiva’s. “We’ll never get to Stamford if we stop for every deadbeat whose car’s on the blink.”
His laugh showed stained teeth as he pull off his leather gloves. “Ignore her. It’s my car, and I’m the driver.”
Her long nails were painted red, all death and love, and I thought she was going to vandalise his car—then mine—by scratching the paintwork. “I want to get to a hotel so’s we can fuck some more.”
“All in good time, my dear.” He turned to me. “I’ll call the AA on my radio telephone. Won’t take more than a shake,” which, after I’d flipped my card out and given the number, it didn’t, me spelling details through the window, while his girlfriend stepped up and down the lay-by careful not to go up to her ankles in sludge. “They’ll be here in about forty minutes,” he said.
I offered a cigar, and told him my name. “I’ll never forget your kindness. I’m off to see my aged and widowed mother in Nottingham. Who do I have the privilege of being eternally grateful to?”
“John Dropshort,” he said in his upper class drawl. “Lord Dropshort, actually, of Dropshort Manor.”
I used to pass the place on bike rides up the Trent as a youth, sometimes climbing over a wall into one of the orchards, to be chased off by a gardener, though once I got close enough to see the big house covered in ivy, and people playing croquet on the lawn. “I know it. A fine old pile.”
“What sort of thing do you do?” He pulled his cap straight, though it wasn’t askew. “You know, to earn a living?”
“I write novels.” He deserved to know I was more interesting than a superannuated advertising copywriter. “Under the pseudonym of Sidney Blood.”
He stood up into even more than a ramrod. “Oh, but he’s awfully good. I have a few titles in my library—on a back shelf, of course.”
“Thank you.” A touch of modesty in the right place always impressed. “I’m only sorry I don’t have a copy in the car, but when I’m back at my country cottage I’ll send you one, signed personally.”
“Alice,” he called, “come and meet Sidney Blood.”
“Who’s he when he’s at home?” the mardy cow shouted above all the traffic noise.
“She’s illiterate, really.” Dropshort leaned close. “She came through her education in the sixties with flying colours, hardly able to read or write. Her teachers were very pleased at their accomplishment. However, she can do the one thing good that matters, and because of that I saved her from getting half killed this morning.”
I could think of no better way to pass the time waiting for the AA man than to ask: “How was that?”
He guffawed—he really did. “When we came out of the hotel lift in Nottingham my wife Joan was waiting in the lobby, and went for Alice with her walking stick. Quite vindictive. Can’t think why.”
“The fucking bitch.” Alice became more friendly at overhearing her adventure retailed to a stranger, as if it gave her some importance in the world.
“My wife hit the woman next to her by mistake,” Dropshort said. “Alice was very adept at getting out from under.” He gave a dry ruthless laugh. “She’s a quick little trollop, thank the Lord. I pulled the stick off Joan, and broke it.”
“Sounds a real killpig.” I was sure Alice recognised the word, and if she didn’t she had no right to be where she was.
“Killpig?” His eyebrows, or what he had of them, went up.
“It’s a Sidney Blood expression. Means mayhem, a fracas, a real set-to, a fight to end fights, a hard bloody time in unforeseen circumstances.”
“I’m not waiting here all day.” Alice turned to me. “He’s the biggest fucking liar I’ve ever known. It was him as set his wife onto me. He’d told her where we’d be. He does things like that just to wind me up. ‘Life’s too boring, otherwise.’” She imitated him perfectly, and I wondered why she didn’t use that accent all the time, to hide every trace of the slum-dump she came from. “But I’ll show him whether it is or not. He hasn’t seen me when I really get going.”
“She’s an utter slut.” He spoke as if sorry I had to witness them together. “The roughest bit of rough I’ve ever had, but I love her, and I’m not letting her go. She keeps me fit, don’t you, darling?”
“You shut your fucking mouth. He’s such a posh fucker,” she said to me, “he thinks he can get away with everything. But not much longer with me he wont, the fucking long link of shit.”
“See what I mean?” He put his gloves back on, as if he might give her the pasting she deserved. But no: “Doesn’t she have a wonderful vocabulary? It’s perfect. What more could I want? She never puts a word wrong.”
“If you don’t get back in the car this minute I’ll start walking to Stamford,” she said, a wicked glint, “then some lorry driver will pick me up and rape me. He’ll chop me to bits in a wood, and it’ll be all your fault.”
He may have been a member of the aristocracy in his yearning for a woman like that, but there was no doubt at my belonging to the same club in wanting to sink my mutton dagger into her. In spite of her foul mouth she had the sort of lively dead common come-on I had been familiar with all through my youth. It would have felt like being seventeen again pulling her under a bush. A woman like her wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in Blaskin’s presence either. She got her hands at one of his wing mirrors, as if to try twisting it off, which jerked him to life. “If you do that you’ll get the biggest thrashing of your life.”
“Just you fucking try.” The twist of her ruby lips suggested a Pyrrhic victory if he did, and she laughed in his face when he didn’t. “Come on, I’m getting snatched in this wind. I want to get to that nice warm hotel at Stamford you told me about, and throw back a few whiskies.”
“Afraid I have to go.” He offered his hand for a goodbye touch. “Your AA chap should be along any minute. Alice,” he shouted brutally, “come and say goodbye to Mr Blood.”
She poked her head out of the window. “I’m Alice Newbold, and I live in Radford. See you in the Plough sometime, Sid. They’ve got good ale there. Tar-rar!”
He wagged his head. “It’s impossible to civilise her.”
I don’t think he tried very hard, since that wasn’t what he wanted her for. All I could do was wish him luck, as he crossed the traffic lane, missing a lorry by inches, as if the road was empty and he owned it anyway, then drifted towards the A1 at Grantham.
Ten minutes later the AA man came in a breakdown truck, and agreed with my diagnosis of a knackered clutch. “Needs replacing. I’ll load you up and take you to a depot near Nottingham that deals with this sort of car.”
Chapter Four.
Away we went, me sitting so high in the cab that I saw a lot more of the countryside than from my low slung Picaro riding piggy-back behind. At the frontier of Robin Hood’s county a sign showed a man in Sherwood green holding a bow, a dying stag at his feet with the arrow in its throat.
The driver told me he was thinking of packing up his job in the AA and going to work for the Post Office. Everybody itched for a change in their lives, and who could blame them? Maybe something in the St. Vitus climate left no one satisfied, not even me.
I felt my cold coming back, as it usually did on the approaches to Nottingham. I dropped the car at a garage not far from my mother’s, and the manager told me to pick it up next day, providing I had a credit card and could pay three hundred quid. The AA man informed me that he wasn’t allowed to take tips when I offered him a fiver for a drink, so I said it was for his kids’ money box, and then he did.
I walked into my mother’s house without knocking. She lived in one of the few old terraces still standing in the area, and I found her at the kitchen stove boiling some cereal product from Peru. She wore purple trousers and a charcoal grey sweater, and multicoloured saucer-sized earrings like Catherine Wheels about to spin her off into what heave
n I’m sure she couldn’t imagine. Her hair had no grey so I knew she had been to the dyers, or she’d done it over a bucket. She was close to sixty, though I didn’t know which side. “I’m glad you’ve come,” she said. “Have you got any fags?”
I took a carton of Chesterfields out of my bag. “I bought them from a smuggler this morning. Only don’t drop them in that mess of pottage, or you might make it tastier.”
She laid the smokes by, and resumed her stirring. “It might ginger me up. I’m thinking of going back to meat.”
“A good idea,” I said, “and that’s a fact.”
“I’m lively enough, though, don’t you fret.”
“Shall I go to Billy Balls the butcher and buy you a hundredweight of chops?”
“No, I’ll get some tomorrow—organic.”
“Do you have enough money?”
“As much as I want. Gilbert’s generous. He sends me a nice cheque every so often.”
“He told me he was missing you. Said he was dying to see you, only the other day. He talked about your romantic beginnings. He went all moony about what you used to get up to.”
“Moony? That selfish bastard? He’s as hard as teak. I don’t believe it.” She bent down for another smell at the disgusting stuff on the stove. “Are you keeping busy?”
“You know me. Never anything else.”
An overweight girl with a round face and straight mousey hair stood in the doorway. “This is Paula,” my mother said. “She keeps me busy and lively, don’t you, love?” She gave her a kiss on the lips. “I love her so much I almost wish she had a sister. Don’t I, pet? And you can keep your filthy man’s hands off her.”
She needn’t have worried. I was still besotted by Dropshort’s foul-mouthed beauty, till it occurred to me he hadn’t been Lord anything at all. People hardly ever being what they say they are, he was a cove who had pulled off a big bank robbery and, having been to acting class as a youth, and done a fair amount of time studying the subject as well as others in jail, he was living it up while he could, doing so well in the pose of a dissolute lord he almost had me fooled. I hoped he wouldn’t get pulled in by the police before reaching Stamford.
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